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Economy

April 14, 2014

People participating in the food stamp program outnumbered the women who worked full-time, year-round in the United States in 2012, according to data from the Department of Agriculture and the Census Bureau.

February 04, 2014

The new healthcare law will cost the nation the equivalent of 2.5 million workers in the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in a report released Tuesday.

The nonpartisan agency found the reform law’s negative effects on the economy would be “substantially larger” than what it had previously anticipated.

It said the equivalent of 2.3 million workers would be lost by 2021, compared to its previous estimate of 800,000, and that 2.5 million workers would be lost by 2024. It also projected that labor force compensation would be reduced by 1 percent from 2017 to 2024 — twice its previous estimate — and that declining economic growth would add $1 trillion more to deficits.

November 09, 2013

About a month, my Company went public (PINC on Nasdaq). We had our annual Company meeting in Charlotte this past week, and had a surprise visitor, the Nasdaq people! Our executive team was able to ring the opening bell the day we went public, and Nasdaq was nice enough to bring the opening bell down to NC to let our CEO ring it again during our general session:

September 30, 2013

The Democrats had the opportunity to keep the Government funded, and voted against it.

On a strict party-line vote, the U.S. Senate rejected a measure passed by the House which would fund the government and delay the implementation of the Affordable Care Act by one year. By a vote of 54 – 46, the Senate rejected the measure and sent the bill back to the House.

August 24, 2013

On Wednesday, the Nevada AFL-CIO passed a resolution declaring that “the unintended consequences of the ACA will lead to the destruction of the 40-hour work week.” That’s quite an accomplishment for a “health” “care” “reform” law. But the poor old union heavies who so supported Obamacare are now reduced to bleating that they should be entitled to the same opt-outs secured by big business and congressional staffers. It’s a very strange law whose only defining characteristic is that no one who favors it wants to be bound by it.

Meanwhile, on the very same day as the AFL-CIO was predicting the death of the 40-hour week, the University of Virginia announced plans to boot working spouses off its health plan beginning January 1 because the Affordable Care Act has made it unaffordable: It’s projected to add $7.3 million dollars to the university’s bill in 2014 alone.

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But it also has a broader destabilizing effect: As I noted a couple of weeks ago, at the low end, about 40 percent of Americans now do minimal-skilled service jobs — the ones that, in the wake of Obamacare, are becoming neither full-time nor part-time but kinda-sorta two-thirds-time in order not to impose health-insurance obligations on the employer. In the middle, a similar number of Americans are diverted into those paper-shuffling jobs that do provide health benefits — say, in the “human resources” department of the bureaucracy; the kind of job in which you pass the time calling someone in Idaho to say you need them to fill in a W-9 before you can send them a 1099, or vice versa. And, at the top end, privileged Americans spend six-figure sums acquiring college degrees that admit them to an homogenized elite that tells itself Obamacare makes perfect sense for everyone except them.

August 21, 2013

Other smaller cuts had been made in the past few weeks in various sites around the country, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the changes haven’t been publicly disclosed. San Francisco-based Wells Fargo was the largest employer among U.S. banks at midyear with about 274,000 people.

Wells Fargo has said the bank expects the pace of mortgage lending to slow for the rest of this year as higher interest rates cut into demand for refinancing.

August 19, 2013

Millions of Americans, that is, stand to gain or lose from how this law is enforced — with the Obama administration bending that enforcement in ways that test, and arguably exceed, the boundaries of lawful conduct.

Every time the White House undercuts one provision of Obamacare, there is a massive ripple effect on other provisions. It's generally a zero-sum game: When someone gains, someone else loses. Example: When employers are relieved of their mandate to provide insurance, taxpayers risk having to subsidize more of those companies' employees.

The administration asserts that it can make these changes under the president's broad executive authority. Yet critics make a compelling argument that the president is stretching the limits. Former federal appellate Judge Michael McConnell, director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, writes in The Wall Street Journal about a different sort of mandate: the mandate in Article II of the Constitution that the president "'shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.' This is a duty, not a discretionary power. ... As the Supreme Court wrote long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes 'would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of Congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.'"

Like most issues of presidential authority, this isn't cut and dried. Presidents do have broad discretion on how laws are enforced. But they're on shaky ground when they decide whether to enforce a law. It's not hard to understand why: Imagine the outcry if President Mitt Romney refused to enforce, say, Obamacare.

Granted, any president may decline to enforce statutes he believes are unconstitutional. But Obama is making no such claim here. Basically, he is admitting that parts of law are impossible to enforce on the deadlines imposed by Congress — deadlines he signed into law. He's also admitting he doesn't want to have Congress make these changes, for fear that if lawmakers get their mitts on this unpopular program, they would at least debate far more extensive changes than he'd like.

One of the federal government’s biggest social welfare programs, which expanded when the economy convulsed, isn’t shrinking back alongside the recovery.

Food stamp rolls were up 0.2% from the prior month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in data that aren’t adjusted for seasonal variations. Though annual growth continues, the pace has slowed since the depths of the recession.

The number of recipients in the food stamp program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), is at 47.6 million, or nearly one in six Americans.

I have to remind readers from time to time that one simply cannot take one aspect of the jobs picture, and hold that up as "proof" that the economy is strong or weak.

Remember that when you see pundits and trolls today pointing to the "drop" in unemployment as an indicator the Country is headed in the right direction under Obama's policies.

The reality is that this most recent iteration of Obama's "Recovery Summer" is about as effective as the ones that came before it. The Obama Stimulus didn't do anything, except transfer wealth from taxpayers to connected Obama cronies. Failed experiments with connected "green" firms threw taxpayer money to poorly managed, verge of bankrupt companies. Taxpayer money went to only hold off the inevitable in Detroit. The President has promised us a "laser-like" focus on jobs for several years, with little appreciable results.